Not long ago, around the "World Book Day" in 2022, major platforms launched a series of book-themed landing activities. This helps to reaffirm the meaning of reading. In addition to the festival, the book bloggers who have risen on social media such as Little Red Book, B Station, and Weibo in recent years are also carrying out daily reading promotion. However, there are also some batch copy content outputs in it, which have caused people to complain. For example, in recent years, on the social sharing platform represented by Xiaohongshu, many cultural bloggers and book bloggers with "reading" as people have emerged. The content of notes around reading experience sharing and recording the daily life of reading attracts the attention of the audience, and the "one key and three consecutive" results are also quite eye-catching. In general, this seems to be a sign that reading is gradually sinking.
Stills from The Siege (1990).
However, the content production of this part of the reading blogger is worth scrutinizing. The title is full of pompous statements that blow the selected books to the sky, such as "This book has reborn me", "Seven books that have opened up the gap with my peers and improved my cognition", "After reading these six books, I am suddenly not impetuous", etc., can not help but wonder, reading books has such a miraculous effect? The ancients clouded "books and medicines", but they also needed to be "good at reading" to force "medical stupidity", not to mention the effect of "rebirth". From time to time, there are bloggers who report on the progress of reading in different forms, and some bloggers directly ask "I read 500 books a year, what about you?" More bloggers are falling on "practical action," including three to five tweeters of new books. In this regard, some people questioned that "these book bloggers really finished reading the books they pushed".
At the same time, some of the notes have also been disputed. In August 2021, Zhou Jiaxun, a former children's book editor and manager of Owl Bookstore, claimed that his original articles published on the WeChat platform were "moved" to the Xiaohongshu platform by a blogger within a few days. Afterwards, although the handling notes were deleted, the parties did not publicly express their position on the matter. According to Zhou Jiaxun's reply in the comment area of the original post, the blogger did not think that this constituted "plagiarism", and said in a private message that "I don't know who wrote it, I can use it as I like". In February this year, Zhou Jiaxun published an article in the official issue of The Publisher magazine, publicly questioning whether such push notes that lack the ability to produce original content are still trustworthy.
Stills from the TV series Normal People 2020.
In addition, the claims of many book bloggers that the "great rewards" brought by reading are also eye-catching. Among the highly praised notes, promises such as "free paper books every day" and "monthly income by reading books" continue to stir the curiosity of the audience. Therefore, experience sharing such as "how to be a book blogger from zero to one" also constitutes a somewhat unique landscape under this vertical content - from title making to head map shooting, there is a set of tacit "rules". There are also gimmicks that say "you can make money by copying books", and teach you to monetize by hand. The clear price of thousands of yuan is aimed at the "real money" in the pockets of the audience. How can these writing courses that claim to master the "explosive code" "turn decay into magic"? And we can see on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu that many of the most trafficked content is exactly to teach people how to be a book blogger, but some are just outputting some "secrets" to avoid the risk of plagiarism, and some are more advanced and make a community.
Written by | Shen Lu
Entry 1.0: Password for "Push Book" notes
Stills from Kung Fu (2004).
In detail, sharing reading tips on social media platforms is nothing new. In the early years, self-media people who have accumulated reading experience in specific fields, or people in the publishing industry, book critics, etc. will also register for accounts on social media. In recent years, "mass-produced" reading notes have also gradually entered the market for traffic. Taking the statistics of the Little Red Book platform from April 20, 2021 to April 20, 2022 as an example, the number of tweets around "reading notes" and "book lists" has shown a fluctuating upward trend in the past year. The overall layout of these tweets is similar, mostly composed of new book introductions, celebrity endorsements, and excerpts of good sentences, supplemented by similar reading experiences, and the proportion of single-category content of books is quite high.
From April 20, 2021 to April 20, 2022, the Xiaohongshu platform used "reading notes" and "book lists" as search terms for the release of notes statistics. (Data source: Xinhong, the Xiaohongshu data platform under the New List)
However, in general, compared with the categories of beauty wear, food sharing, life records and other categories of content, the owner of the reading blog in the field of culture has not yet entered the mainstream of the Xiaohongshu platform. Judging from the top 100 blogger marker fields in the february-March 2022 ranking, most bloggers are still from traditional fields that conform to the tone of the Little Red Book community, and the number of influential head reading bloggers is still limited. Compared with the rapidly growing number of booklet notes, this seems to reflect the blue ocean of future development of the field, and the vacuum of influence also proves that the relevant content is currently in a state of barbaric growth. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why posts that teach others to be book bloggers tend to receive higher attention.
Little Red Book top blogger field distribution. (Data source: Xinhong, the Xiaohongshu data platform under the New List)
And in this seemingly booming trend of reading sharing, most of the notes with high traffic are indeed the experience of these people who teach people how to be a book blogger. On the personal homepages of many book bloggers with more than 10,000 fans, there are few notes related to the book, and the templated secret sharing at the top of the number of likes is mainly.
In terms of specific content, "altruism" is almost a traffic password repeatedly emphasized by such senior book bloggers. The formulation of the title is a concentrated embodiment of "altruism". Notes that receive high praise often highlight the changes that the pushed book brings to itself at the title, especially the "immediacy" and "contrast" of the change itself. Many bloggers have said that "it is not enough to share your feelings, the key is how much your feelings can solve the needs of others" Therefore, specific reading notes are often not as "useful" as a basket of bibliographic packaging.
It is not difficult to find in the title of the book list notes that the top 20 likes of the Little Red Book are a common feature. What kind of books can make people "no longer want to play mobile phones", "full scores in history", "learn to draw a picture", and even "prevent spending money", etc., which point to the pain points of the current public emotions, and in addition to "useful", "having results" seems to be more important.
In the Little Red Book, the "book list" was used as the keyword search, and the top 20 notes were counted in terms of the number of likes. (Source: Xinhong, a xiaohongshu data platform under Xinbang; statistical time: April 20, 2022)
It is worth mentioning that this kind of "altruistic" sharing is also easy to change the flavor in the actual operation process. Some mass-produced reading notes were "unexpectedly" welcomed by the middle and high school student groups, and many messages said that "winter and summer vacation homework has landed.". In fact, in order to encourage students to use their vacation time to broaden their reading horizons, teachers often supervise them by assigning homework tasks such as reading notes and good sentence excerpts. Behind the influx of traffic, perhaps even the blogger himself did not expect that the content that was originally positioned to push the book would block the reader from the book.
At the same time, the quality of the content of the main part of such notes is also uneven. In an article in The Publisher's Magazine, Zhou Jiaxun, a former book editor, said that many reading notes directly copied the promotional materials provided by the publisher were almost an open secret in the industry. If the quality of the book is judged only from the material of the publication, how much bias is the conclusion, and how much reference value can the recommendation of "endorsement" from this point of view give the reader? This is also one of the points of controversy that have been sparked by this phenomenon recently, namely whether the notes are sincere enough.
Once you use emotions as a traffic password, you are also susceptible to emotional regurgitation. In the short term, marketing-oriented reading notes may attract the attention of readers and thus drive book sales; in the long run, it consumes mutual trust between publishers, book promoters and readers. Taking the notes related to "Fish Without Feet", which has a high number of likes on the Xiaohongshu platform, as an example, many bloggers say that they are "healed by the words in it" so that "every word wants to be copied", and then attached excerpts from almost similar fragments in the book. However, some readers have feedback on the reading experience after "pulling the grass", saying that the book is "broken and completely unable to read", and questioning whether the push book blogger has read the whole book. If readers are wrapped up in emotions and impulsively start a new book for the "search for healing", they are more likely to fall into disappointment that does not match expectations, and then evolve into "what the blogger pushes I don't buy".
Advanced 2.0: "Copying" a money-making business
Stills from the TV series Party A and Party B (2007).
In the experience sharing of a group of book bloggers from zero to one, the notes around "copying books to make money" have received more than 10,000 likes and collections.
What is a "copy"? In fact, it is not so mysterious, it is literal. According to the relevant bloggers in the notes, "copying books to make money" is simply to take a photo of the golden sentences in the book and upload them as picture materials to the micro-headline column of today's headline platform, which feedback the poster's income by evaluating relevant data. The specific revenue is affected by a combination of factors such as the number of impressions of the post, the number of readers, and the length of time the audience stays. Subsequently, this method has also been gradually moved to platforms such as Xiaohongshu as a means of increasing fans to novice bloggers.
If motivated by revenue, it may also be a good thing that more and more readers join the reading action. However, when the income rises to the main purpose of reading, it is easy to breed chaos. When "copying books" is also considered time-consuming and laborious, some bloggers suggest directly "taking pictures to text". More bloggers said that even if there is no book, it will not affect the copying of books. The way to open up shortcuts is to "innovative use" of applications such as "WeChat Reading" in the era of Internet reading - click on the "Popular Dash" section of best-selling books and directly copy high-praise reader comments. Some bloggers also ridiculed: "Looking at the same idea as me, I agree with it, but what people say, there is culture at a glance, quickly write it down." All of this seems to be somewhat contrary to "reading" itself.
So, can "copying books" really make money? When readers leave a message in the comment area with curiosity, the act itself is helping the poster make money. Under the gimmick of "copying books to make money", a tweet often attracts tens of thousands of impressions. As such bloggers put it, "Making other things on micro-headlines also makes money, but copying books (making money) is easier to get high reading." On the other hand, whether the audience stops and browses specific content is the key to affecting the level of revenue. "The word count cannot be less than 500, otherwise the reader will read it in one second." According to some bloggers, the way to quickly produce "small essays" is to carry out "secondary creation" on the basis of the copied content - retaining the main context of the original text, adding the author's personal background, and matching some patchwork comments.
The "answer" of the book blogger on whether the copy is suspected of infringement.
In this regard, many readers also questioned in the message area whether this kind of content produced by others for profit is suspected of infringement. Some of the discussions that have been triggered are also ironic, "do not copy the living, do not copy the Chinese" is enshrined as a guideline, from the perspective of the high praise comments, perhaps add a "do not copy celebrities" . Some book bloggers explain this roughly into two points. One is that authors and publishers default to the act of copying books to help push books, so they are often not accountable; second, they also have a personalized interpretation of "infringement". In his view, this behavior refers to "using other people's books for huge profits", but copying books has little influence, at most as a side business to earn pocket money, "the original creator himself will not go to the heart".
Stills from Big Shots (2001).
When the accumulation of fans to a certain extent, some book bloggers will also monetize by receiving advertisements. Advertising content is not limited to book sales, and peripheral products around books such as home decoration and electronic devices may be implanted in reading notes in the form of recommendations. Interestingly, the fans of book readers or knowledge bloggers don't seem to be easy consumer groups to monetize. Dong Chenyu, a teacher at the School of Journalism at Chinese Min University, who is active on social media, once bluntly said on Weibo that he "does not take brand promotion" and joked that most of the people who pay attention to themselves are "familiar with the theory of communication political economy and are good at resisting capitalism through strategic appropriation... [The brand side] will not only fail to meet them, but will also be deconstructed by them." Although it is a joke, it is not difficult to see that in the community relationship with knowledge sharing as the link, the two parties to the interaction are often more sensitive to "Amway" other than knowledge.
In this sense, the relationship between mass-produced book bloggers and fans seems to be more based on a suspended "intellectual imagination". Fast-food reading is packaged as a shortcut to an ideal life, and the promise of the book's attachment seems far more attractive than the book itself, and ultimately points to how to quickly monetize.
Upgrade 3.0: "The other party sent an invitation to join the group"
Stills from Kung Fu (2004).
There is also a subtle "chain of contempt" within the book blogger, the copy book blogger believes that the push book blogger copying the publishing house material "no technology", and the copy book needs to be re-created "more advanced". In comparison, though, none of this seems to be as good as "writing a book."
Little Red Book A reading blogger's notes page.
In the message area of an article made by the public account, a reader who had been a physical bookstore owner and later settled in Xiaohongshu as a book blogger claimed to have witnessed the "chaotic" decay of this group in the past two years, and some bloggers gradually embarked on the old road of monetizing writing courses. And this reader also explained the logical rupture: "Why do you have to start teaching people to write when you read more?" What kind of content is being taught in the so-called "writing bootcamps"?
Such course pitches tend to initially throw hooks in the form of "free sharing". Some book bloggers with more than 10,000 fans will release "nanny-level tutorials" on their personal homepages to tell how they wrote explosive book push notes with "zero foundation". In general, the so-called cheats are summarized as a four-step minimalist template — the opening points out conflicts contrary to public perception, followed by a 300 to 500-word "copy book" describing the specific story, followed by a summary of the author's main point of view, and finally a positive recommendation to hang up the link to the original book. The seemingly clear-cut guide is nothing more than a copy of "How to put an elephant in the refrigerator." When the reader is curious about the specific operation and expresses "asking for a belt", the next step is "the direction you have issued an invitation to enter the group".
On the one hand, such communities continue to absorb potential consumers of writing courses, and the group of entrants is often a group with a clear demand for how to become a fast-track reading blogger, so the peddling of related courses is also easier to achieve accurate access. On the other hand, the members of the community themselves will also form a substantial "mutual help relationship", mutual fans, improve the quality of interaction, these are the "into the group" of the gifts. The book bloggers who joined earlier have gradually become the administrators of the community, and their main tasks are to answer questions from group members on a daily basis, help the head bloggers to correct the students' coursework, and push follow-up course advertisements at the appropriate time. The price of related courses is often thousands, and how do these writing courses that claim to master the "explosive code" "turn decay into magic"?
According to the relevant explosive content teaching bibliography, the premise of producing explosive models is to concentrate on the characteristics of explosive models. In his view, the secret is that "the explosions are repetitive", and "100% success = 70% similar to the blockbusters× enough experimental products". This formula is applied to the content production of the reading and writing camp, and it is transformed into a formulaic title of "pain point + solution", a study picture that creates a sense of atmosphere, and a "creative" content filled with specific templates. And the so-called "creativity" does not seem to have to be a big effort or expectation of a flash of inspiration, but can be achieved through methods such as "hard combinations" and "role changes".
"Hard combination" refers to the artificial connection between two things that have no connection, such as the "cross-border combination" of completely unrelated things, and the application of the concept of corporate listing to the level of personal struggle, which creates a "new" view of "life is IPO".
The "change of role" is to exchange the role A and character B in the original work that conform to the public perception, such as reversing the characters of Tang Monk and Sun Wukong in "Journey to the West", reorganizing the dialogue, and attracting the reader's attention with a sense of contrast. In repetitive reproduction, the original content becomes blurred, and the reader's attention and emotions are transformed into commodities that serve the growing "number."
Stills from "Ms. Junguier" (2018).
In this artificially set "chain of contempt", with the improvement of the level, the input costs of the parties are constantly pushed up, and the demand for monetization is becoming increasingly urgent. The personality of the book blogger gradually changed from a side job to a main business, and the attention shifted from managing personal notes to maintaining a larger community, and perhaps the original desire for "reading" finally occupied most of life. However, while realizing the realization of living on books, whether or not to fall into the paradox of gradually drifting away and becoming less and less books. Of course, the pursuit of monetization itself is understandable, but in order to achieve efficient monetization, it becomes a "hamster in the wheel" - to compete for traffic and attract attention, to ensure the number of cobbled together content, to pull people into the production of repetitive content... Exhausted by traffic, how far away are these from reading itself?
Resources:
"How outrageous can a reading blogger on the Little Red Book be". ZHOU Jiaxun. Publisher Magazine
"Push book bloggers in the short video era, how low is the threshold?" 》. Make books
"Making Content from Scratch: The Underlying Logic of Blockbuster Content". Lü Bai. China Machine Press. September 2020
"Blockbuster Little Red Book: Playing Strategies from Zero to Millions of Fans". Lü Bai. Beijing Times Chinese Literature Bureau. February 2022